After World War II, Japan enjoyed the benefits of some years of American military occupation. It was during this fortunate period that Toshiko Ciaccio was born. She came to the United States as the wife of an American soldier, got a divorce and began her nearly 20 year  career as a stripper in the Philadelphia, PA area.

She was murdered on September 30, 1992, still stripping at the age of 42, the recipient of 14 blows to the head with a blunt object. She had also benn choked. The body was found nude, wrappen in a tarpaulin, the following morning by two women out walking their dogs. She had apparently been murdered elsewhere and dumped.

In the first week of investigation, police interviewed nearly 100 people in the large numbers of bars in wich she danced; she apparently worked something of a circuit, which included southern New Jersey. She was an efficient earner and was well remembered for her hips. "She could them pop out", one customer remembered. "I don't know how she did that". After her death, one of the clubs in which she danced held a "wet T-shirt night" in her memory, donating the proceeds to charity.

The investigation ground along into the following year, without much result. Then, in August 1993, a 25-year-old "hairdresser turned streetwalker" named Amy Moore was found dead. She had been beaten to death with a blunt object, her nude body wrapped in a camper awning and dumped about four miles from where Ciaccio's body had been found.

A local television station ran a story on the case, a viewer recognized the awning and contacted police, who soon descended on the "blood-stained, foul-smelling" (and awningless) camper of William David Montgomery, 31. Montgomery, a manual laborer who lived with his parents, was arrested and charged with both murders.

The defendant, investigators soon found out, was obsessed wich strip clubs. He visited so many of them so regularly that he got to know many of the women by their first names and was widely recognized as a "regular". He was also a crack addict and his life, as the Philadelphia Daily News commented,  seemed to be "driven by the twin engines of crack and topless dancers".

He seemed quite obsessed with the dancers and in factseemed to sympathize with them as the victims of negative stereotyping, declaring that they were "not like people project them to be".

Ominously, police discovered that a stripper who had gone missing in 1992 had been a neighbor of Montgomery's. Investigators compiled a list of 5 unsolved Philadelphia area homicides of strippers and prostitutes that bore similarities to the Ciaccio and Moore murders, and which occurred in the three years before Montgomery's arrest.

They also discovered that Montgomery had assembled a collection of atripper customes and wondered if any of these might be the "trophies" that serial sex murderers sometimes collect. No other homicides were ever sucessfully attibuted to him however, and so, with only two victims, Montgomery did not met the official minimum requeriment to be considered a serial murderer.

But readers of the Daily News must have wondered after reading an artcle that began,  "Billy Montgomery would finger his beer bottle night after night, his crack-glazed eyes locked on the women who would strip bare and jiggle for him..." It certainly didn't sound too good.

Prosecutors had an extremely strong case against Montgomery, including a large amount of forensic evidence taken from the camper, and in the end he decided to plead guilty to two counts of first-degree murder, in retorn for a sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole.

"Headless man in topless bar", by T. A. Kevlin

SEX: M RACE: W TYPE: T MOTIVE: Sex.

VENUE: Bensalem Township, Pa.

MO: Bludgeoned a stripper and a prostitute with claw hammer

DISPOSITION: Pled guilty and received life term, 1994.

Michael Newton - An Encyclopedia of Modern Serial Killers - Hunting Humans